Like Silk
by Anidori-Kiladra
Summary: The summer after their fifth year, Lavender visits Parvati over the summer holidays and the experience is not quite what she anticipated. Lavender/Padma.
1. Chapter 1

Like Silk

1.

Before she's even let go of the portkey, the sun is blazing down on Lavender. She can feel it on her shoulders and she's afraid to open her eyes. She lets go of the empty cigar box and reaches out her hands blindly. She giggles as they immediately brush cloth and the heavy fall of hair. She tugs one of Parvati's braids.

There's a gasp, and the hair is yanked out of her grasp. Parvati's voice hisses, "Lav!" but it's coming from behind her. Lavender slowly peels her eyes open to see Padma standing in front of her, rubbing her scalp.

"That hurt," she informs Lavender, scowling, and even though her eyes do not look especially angry, Lavender finds herself looking away, down at the ground, and steps back to stand beside Parvati.

Padma has always intimidated her, ever since first year. Where Parvati is all laughter and hair ornaments and talk of boys, Padma is quiet and serious and serene, and Lavender cannot find a single thing to say to her.

Here, it is especially bad, for here she cannot escape up to her bedroom with Parvati, as she has done all the other times, the past three summer holidays when Parvati has come to visit her in Brighton. Now, the summer after their fifth year, she is finally going with Parvati and her family to her grandmother's house in Maharashtra, a name Lavender repeats over and over to herself until the syllables feel strange on her tongue, terrified that she will pronounce it wrong and everyone will be horribly insulted or laugh at her or worse, Padma will simply smirk and turn away, hair and skirt swishing.

Every summer, Parvati has announced in writing her intention of having Lavender come to stay, "at the end of July, yeah? Or maybe the beginning of August, it's not quite so hot then." But the plans were never firm and like so many other goals and to-dos, they simply floated away as summer progressed. And besides, India is so far away, Lavender's mum said it simply wouldn't be practical to go only for a week or two.

But finally, they had made plans in April and confirmed them by May and Lavender had finally prevailed upon her mother to accept that yes, she was quite old enough to spend a whole summer away from home, thank you very much.

But now, standing here in front of the house, Lavender isn't so sure. She looks around as Padma and Parvati's parents emerge from the house, hurrying toward their daughters yet still managing to look stately, embracing them. She looks at the house for the first time, seeing the wide, sweeping porch with the thin railing all the way around, the columns appearing too narrow to hold up the second story, and the roof that curves up and away at the edges. She isn't sure she is ready for this at all.


	2. Chapter 2

2.

Inside, it is dark and cool and the hallways are narrow. Lavender at first thinks the wallpaper is brown, but when they pass an unshuttered window, elongated rectangles of light catch glints of gold.

"And here's your room!" Parvati bounces ahead of her, yanking the door open. Inside, it is light and curtains blow in toward the small bed in the center.

"I didn't know I got my own room," says Lavender, somehow embarrassed, though she doesn't know exactly why. She just knows that her stomach twists uncomfortably with the thought of being away from Parvati every night in a strange house. She is no longer used to sleeping in a room alone.

"We'll still have sleepovers practically every night," Parvati says, grabbing Lavender's hand and swinging it. "Now, come meet my family. Grandmother's dying to meet you," and Lavender barely has time to drop her spelled-small trunk on the bed before she is dragged back down the corridor again.

Padma and Parvati's grandmother is a small and wrinkled woman in a bright pink sari. She almost disappears into the giant armchair she sits upon, a magenta streak surrounded by cushions, and Lavender doesn't know whether she should bow or kiss her hand, but ends up just shaking it instead. She hears a noise behind her and turns to see Padma, hand over her mouth and eyes sparkling.

Lavender blushes and backs away, keeping the smile pasted to her mouth as Parvati turns her this way and that, introducing her to aunts and uncles and more cousins than Lavender has ever seen in one place at one time, not even on Christmas at her own gran's house.

It's refreshing when she can finally escape, on the pretense of exploring the garden. It's beautiful out there, blooming with flowers she doesn't have a name for, an explosion of color that seems to fill the whole world. Lavender walks between the rows, going deeper and deeper into the garden, where the plants grow taller and taller until they are above her head and she feels as though she is lost in a maze, though if she turns her head to look behind her, she can still see the house.

She looks ahead again, and reaches out to touch the petals of a gigantic white lily that bends down over the path. Her finger is an inch from it when a voice from behind her says, "I wouldn't touch that if I were you."

Lavender whirls around and sees Padma, looking down with half a smile as she plucks a bur from her skirt.

"Why not?" she asks, realizing as she does so that her voice sounds combative, but she can't help it, Padma makes her feel off-balance, like any moment she might say something idiotic or else trip and fall right off the face of the planet.

Padma raises one thin eyebrow. "Poisonous," she says.

Lavender turns and examines the blossom, trying to make her breathing sound more natural. "It doesn't look poisonous."

"Well, that's because it's not, really," Padma says, and when Lavender looks at her sharply, her lips curve up at the corners and her eyes seem suddenly full of sunlight. "But Mum will kill you if you so much as bruise a petal, so it's best to treat it like it's poisonous anyway."

"Oh," Lavender laughs shakily. "Well, thanks for the warning."

She gives Padma and awkward smile and turns to continue walking, and Padma falls into step beside her. "So, relatives scare you off?" she asks.

Lavender laughs again, a mixture of nervousness and relief that Padma has provided her with a topic. "There were just so many of them."

"Well, most of them will be gone by dinnertime," Padma says.

Lavender must look surprised, because Padma says, "They don't all live here, you know."

"I, I know," Lavender says, through in truth she had wondered if the house would always be this full. "Well, the house is big enough for them all, anyway."

"Yes," says Padma simply. "Big enough to hide in, too."

Then she smiles again and turns back toward the house. "See you at dinner," she says.

Lavender stays where she is, watching Padma walk away, stopping along her way to reach up to the giant white lily and tap it with a finger. She half wants to chase after Padma and ask her what she meant about hiding, but in the end she just continues along until she reaches the end of the garden and turns around just in time to see the sun set behind the house and paint the roof orange.

xXx

Later, after dinner, Lavender begins to unpack her trunk, carefully placing folded stacks of shirts and jeans in drawers that smell faintly of lavender. There is a knock at the door and Parvati pokes her head in.

"Hey," she says, coming to sit on the edge of Lavender's bed. Lavender sets one last t-shirt down and closes the dresser drawer before sitting down beside Parvati.

"Why did you disappear earlier?" Parvati asks her, frowning slightly. "All the aunts were disappointed that you didn't stay to talk."

"I'm sorry," Lavender hunches her shoulders. "It's just, I felt so out of place, so overwhelmed. I didn't mean to be rude or anything."

"Don 't worry," Parvati says, slinging an arm around her shoulders and squeezing gently. "It'll feel like home in no time. You'll see."

Lavender bites her lip. "Yeah," she says, trying to convince herself. "I'm sure it will."


	3. Chapter 3

3.

But as the days and weeks and then a whole month passes, Lavender still does not feel at home. She blushes as she mumbles the words to the Hindi prayer they way before eating; she continues to stammer whenever she speaks to Parvati's family and cannot understand why, for she has never had much trouble speaking to strangers before. Perhaps it is because they are all adults, all different, and all around her. But whatever the reason, Lavender mostly sits in miserable silence and counts the moments until she is allowed to escape back to the room that has temporarily become hers.

Surprisingly, it is Padma that she speaks to the most. Parvati, naturally, has got loads of friends in India. She never talked about them much back at school, except when she received the occasional letter, looking battered but still smelling slightly of cloves when she opened it in the girls' dormitory.

But here, they too are everywhere, and Parvati is forever running off, joyful and prancing through the doorway to meet them downtown or at the public swimming pool on hot afternoons (and every afternoon is hot). She invites Lavender, of course, and at first Lavender is glad to be invited, until she finds that sitting at the poolside listening to unfamiliar accents discuss people and places and memories she's never heard of is just as bad if not worse than staring across the sitting room as Parvati's gran chews her lips and looks back at her in silence.

So she soon starts making excuses, about being tired, feeling ill, the weather not agreeing, or thinking that she really should get started on the summer homework for Transfiguration now that they've gotten their OWL results. And soon—too soon—after that, Parvati stops asking.

Padma, it transpires, does not have the slew of primary school friends her sister does; at home, like at school, it would seem, she is quiet and reserved and satisfied to walk by herself and chuckle at jokes no one else understands.

Lavender takes to wandering the gardens during the long afternoons that Parvati is absent from the house, and this is where she meets Padma most days. At first, it is an accident, the way Lavender surprises Padma sketching the head of a bobbing purple flower down a long, winding path of blossoms.

"Oh, I'm sorry," she says, and Padma looks up and over her shoulder at her.

"Don't be," says Padma. "You've certainly nothing to be sorry for. Do you like drawing?"

The question comes a bit abrupt, as though Padma is not used to making small talk but has had this question in her mind for a while already, just waiting to spill out into the air at someone.

"I do, a bit," Lavender says. "May I see yours?"

At first it is an accident, but after that, Lavender seeks Padma out, sits beside her on the wide porch with legs sticking out between the thin wooden rails, talking of Hogwarts and of home, or in the grass of the garden, sketching together.

With Padma, Lavender learns to get used to the silence, to read it and know when it is time to let it lie still and when it is time to break it. She begins to know what it is like to be close to someone without knowing much at all about them, to feel comfortable and right leaning over and pushing a lock of Padma's hair back off her cheek, a simple half smile all the thanks she needs.

xXx

One night in late July, there is a storm. It begins at dinner.

"Monsoon season is coming early this year," Parvati's mother observes, the most Lavender has heard her speak in at least a week, and Lavender shoots a glance at Parvati to see what this means, and Parvati says, "It'll start raining, hard. Oh, you've never seen rain like this, Lav."

"It's beautiful," Padma pipes up, looking down at her plate, "And it doesn't try to hide its darkness. I like that." Then she looks up, and smiles slow at Lavender. Lavender smiles back, pleased to be smiled at, though almost alarmed at the awed note in Padma's voice. At this, Lavender is reminded that there is still so much of her that Lavender cannot grasp, the small puzzled moments and silences of the bad sort when Lavender cannot for the life of her figure out what Padma is saying and why.

That night, Lavender cannot sleep. She tosses and turns and listens to rain pounding on wooden shutters, rat-tat-tatting a beat she cannot get her heart to match.

Then the wind begins, howls through the house and sounds so close Lavender is sure that it is going to pull her right out of bed, out of the house, and lose her among the fields and vast wildernesses she is sure lie just outside of town.

When thunder crashes right at the foot of her bed, jolting her upright, she runs into Parvati's room, slamming the door shut and leaping straight into Parvati's bed, rolling into a ball against Parvati's warm, sleeping back.

Parvati murmurs something groggy, shifting against Lavender and turning her head so that their cheeks touch. She breathes out warm and heavy into Lavender's ear and Lavender lets out all the breaths she's been holding, feeling more safe and comforted than she has all summer, in a room finally that does not seem too big for her.

Then Parvati jerks back, shaking her head and leaning up on one elbow, shadows crossing her eyes as she opens them. Her hair is loose and falls over her shoulders, the ends of the strands tickling Lavender's face, and when she opens her mouth and then frowns slightly, that is when Lavender realizes: in the nighttime confusion of rain and thunder and pounding heart, she has opened the wrong bedroom door, infiltrated the wrong bed, and it is Padma staring down at her looking oh-so-confused, not Parvati at all.

Lavender sits up, then rolls onto the floor and stands there, shifting awkwardly from foot to foot. "Sorry, so sorry," she says, her breath not coming fast enough now, getting tangled in her throat with each new syllable. "I—I know it's stupid, but the thunder scared me and I thought, I thought this was Parvati's room."

Padma pushes her hair behind her ears and pulls the strap of her camisole back up onto her shoulder. Kneeling there in pants that look silky in the dim and shaky lightning-light, she tilts her head to the right and Lavender has never really thought about how pretty Padma is before, and Parvati. How pretty they both are.

"It's all right," says Padma, not sounding very sleepy anymore and instead contemplative, eyes lingering on Lavender's clenched fists and crossed arms and one foot on top of the other. She leans down on one elbow again and lifts up the edge of her thin sheet. "I don't mind."

Lavender hesitates, one foot on the floor, but then the thunder crashes again and she tiptoes the three steps to the bed, slides in gently, as though Padma will not notice she is there if she doesn't make the mattress squeak.

She rolls onto her side, away from Padma, clutching the sheet up to her chin, but she can feel herself shaking with fear or cold or something else entirely, and from behind her she hears Padma sigh. Then the mattress squeaks again as Padma rolls toward her and wraps her arm around Lavender under the sheet, hand resting on her belly.

"You're cold," Padma says, breath ruffling Lavender's hair, and Lavender tries not to stiffen and finds that it is entirely too easy not to, finds herself instead relaxing back against Padma, finds herself wondering at how well they fit together and how long it has been since she was held like this, how long it has been since she was held at all.

Padma's breath in her ear is soft, and Lavender closes her eyes and tries to match her breaths to Padma's, feeling her heartbeat slow and images of golden curtains on a sunlit laundry line fill her mind.

Looking at her in the light of the morning, yellow and rose-pink, it is even easier to see what Lavender noticed last night, what is now, in fact, quite impossible to miss. The long nose and thin eyebrows, smooth brown skin and a tiny wrinkle in her chin—maybe a scar from some near-forgotten childhood accident—the way she holds her shoulders back even in sleep, all of it repeating in Lavender's eyes and in her mind that Padma is exceptionally beautiful.

* * *

a/n: Updated at long last! And only one more chapter to go. Let me know what you thought of this one!


	4. Chapter 4

4.

As soon as Lavender has this thought—the thought that Padma is beautiful, truly beautiful in a way that Lavender or even Parvati never will be, the thought that she could lie here and look at Padma's face for hours, trying to memorize it, to comprehend the factors that determine its structure and expression—she slides out of Padma's bed as gently as she crawled into it last night, tiptoes backwards through the room and wraps her hand around the doorknob, twisting it as silently as she can and then disappearing down the hallway.

She reaches her own room, sliding through and then letting herself fall onto her bed, lying face-down and breathing harsh breaths through the pillow. She tries and fails to sort her brain into something even vaguely resembling a logical train of thought. But then, Lavender thinks, she has never really been a person that someone would term "logical."

She has never spent the night with someone like that, woken refreshed and calm and happy in the morning. There was a silence and a sigh and a release in sleeping entwined with Padma that Lavender has never known, one that upon waking she never wanted to let go of, one that she now thinks she would like to feel again.

But that thought stirs up something wild in her, something as dark and dangerous as the mysterious crashing monsoon Lavender still does not fully understand, something that spreads outward from her center until her whole body is buzzing with it. To feel Padma's hand across her stomach again, the weight of her against her back, Padma's soft whisper-breaths in her ear. Her whole head shakes with them.

Lavender sits up in bed, takes a deep breath, sets her feet on the floor, comes to a conclusion.

When Lavender walks into the kitchen an hour or so later, bracing herself, it is to see Padma and Parvati there in matching silk dressing gowns, Parvati delicately blowing on her tea and Padma gulping coffee. They both look up and smile as Lavender comes in, Parvati bright and Padma shy and a little sly, a drop of cream catching at the corner of her mouth.

As she dresses and then the day passes (and she cannot meet Padma's eye and her breath comes short whenever she tries and Parvati leans over and whispers to her that she is acting weird, what on earth is wrong with her), her resolution solidifies. By the time she goes to bed that night, Lavender thinks she knows what she wants to do, but doesn't know how to do it.

xXx

Three days later, on the night of the second storm, Lavender finds her opportunity.

This time, she is not frightened but elated by the crash of thunder and shimmer of lightning on her walls, because she knows what they mean. The flashes now provide for her a path to follow as she walks, placing her bare feet carefully, down the hall and she doesn't hesitate when she reaches the end of the hallway and two identical doors. The thunder breaks the gateway, allows her to twist the doorknob and step inside.

Padma is sitting up in bed when Lavender turns away from the now closed door. Shy again, always shy when she least expects to be, that first rush of bravery gone, Lavender stands with her hands behind her back and shrugs one shoulder up.

Padma smiles, so wide Lavender can see it even from the door, and she thinks that if she were closer, she would see Padma's eyes crinkling too, like they do right before one of her infrequent, secretive laughs. Padma lifts one shoulder in return and then holds out her hand toward Lavender.

Even Lavender, nervousness beating in her throat, cannot mistake the invitation. She walks to the bed, heels never touching the floor, and climbs onto it, settling down on her knees about a foot from Padma. She reaches out a tentative hand to Padma's shoulder, then runs one finger down the length of Padma's arm, air shuddering from her lungs as she does so. Under her finger, Padma's skin is like silk.

Then Padma grasps Lavender's hand in her own, faster than Lavender would have thought possible. She brings Lavender's hand to her mouth, kissing her palm. Her voice quiet and full of something Lavender is longing to discover and taste and know, she says, "I wondered when you would come back."

And for the first time since she arrived in India, Lavender is home.


End file.
